Living Heartilly
by GyrosKairos42
Summary: Vignettes of Rinoa's life pre-game; may be collected properly into a story later.  Rated for a bit of language.
1. Kristallnacht

(A few notes:  All right, following vignettes are bits and pieces from a larger story that I'm currently working on; each will be headed with a little explanation of where and when in the plot each occurs.  All of these are pre-game incidents in Rinoa's life, some as specified within the game's universe, some the product of my own twisted imagination.  This is as much of a beginning as Rinoa's story warrants.)  

She remembered her mother, albeit faintly in the warm quiet darkness of her closed eyes.  She remembered her mother's pale, strong hands and graceful fingers as they stroked the piano keys, remembered tracing each smooth knuckle and nail with her own child's thumb until she had it memorized.

It had been raining that horrible day when the sky fell.  The downpour was sudden, changing the dull evening into greasy, treacherous night in a matter of seconds.  She thought later that the clouds had simply opened to pour out their grief in a violent flood, a bass line over which the tires of the car squealed like a stricken beast on the wet street…

She remembered being held on her mother's lap, playing with her soft hair.  Her mother had a way of sitting quietly, of letting the rushing music of the silence well so deeply from her that the child remembered the tune of it even better than the songs.  She remembered the slow, marvelously wistful smile that was better than candy, the crisp clean vanilla smell of sheet music and hand lotion and clean skin.

She never saw the accident, never in this world, but it still played out in her head almost every night for the rest of her life, an old film on a spinning reel that skipped and flapped loose but never quiet stopped.

She would imagine two people, any combination she could think of: an old couple, a young couple, two middle-aged gossips, two teenage girls…

-Do you see that car? one would say, pointing.  –_That_ one, that black limo with, oh, whatsherface, the singer…

-That one? the other would say, more coherently.

-Yes!  Oh, God, _what_ is her _name_?  _You _know who I'm talking about – dark hair, pale, that piano girl…

The dialogue would change sometimes, depending on her mood, depending on what she might have remembered or thought she remembered.  At times she would drag it out, give the characters expressions, gestures, names, inflections, anything to delay the next inevitable sequence….

The second figure would look down the street, mouth opening in the perfect 'o' of incredulous horror.

-Oh, my God…

-Heartilly! the first would shriek in oblivious elation.  – That's it!  Julia Heartilly!  She married, um, _ooh_, that general, arrrg…

Then that figure would see it too.

-Oh my God…

A shattering of glass.  

The car would scream with friction and hideous momentum (like something alive, like some crooning crowing pop singer's voice fraught with contrived emotion) as it spun in perfect accordance to the laws of motion.  The metal would rip with absurd ease, like cheap paper, and the car would become a work of modern, tragic art around the streetlight.

And then the storm would begin in earnest.

She was very young then, but she remembered.  She remembered the shrill shriek of the ambulance that tore by the embassy where her mother was scheduled to perform.  She remembered the resulting sheet of water that had plastered her hair and her summer dress to her small body, her father's scolding her for standing too near the street.  And she remembered the cruel, silent certainty of something gone seriously wrong that did not allow her to cry.

She was five years old when her mother died after being untangled from the wreck.  Her mother could never bear the idea of being chauffeured and insisted on sitting next to the driver of the limousine.  This meant simply that her mother's body had borne the full brunt of the crash.

She never saw the wreck in person – all observations she drew from a recording made by the local news station, which had been ecstatic in finding the death of a celebrity on their doorstep.  The camera had shaken in inexperienced hands, the reporter nervous and speaking too rapidly, but still she saw and still she watched (over and over and over as the years went by…).

Her mother's face was smooth and pale but for the thick rivulet of blood that trickled darkly over her cheekbone from a cut on her forehead, a strange and saintly oval of a face attached incongruously to a mangled body.  Her head had lolled to one side as she was pulled from the automobile's remnants – there were no tears, no final words, no grand and touching gestures performed, only a spurt of blood that came from her mouth like a swan-song and silence.  Her hands, her famous delicate hands that had made her career had been nearly shredded by the glass she had tried to protect herself from, the once familiar shape destroyed and dissolved.

The girl's father had taken her home mutely, his face closed.  He did not touch her.  His profile in the darkness was that of a stranger.  She dared not speak to him.

She prepared for bed alone for the first time, each tiny action of the ritual (brush teeth, comb hair, stretch slowly, embrace Teddy, so on and so on and so on) reaffirming her mother's absence.  She combed her dark hair clumsily.  Her hand was too small to hold the brush properly and it fell from her shaking hand.

She stared at it lying on the thick carpet as if stricken, her hands balled into useless fists.  Her lip trembled, once; then in a spasm of something like fear she flicked off the light and darted into the cold linen sheets of her bed.  She stared, wide-eyed and silent, into the darkness, her room now huge and unfamiliar without her mother's being in the world, and only then did she begin to cry.

(Notes: First of a few scattered moments – reviews as always are welcome.  _Eventually_ all of these may be swept together into a more coherent, linear story, but no promises.  More moments shall come: brace yourself.)


	2. By Any Other Name

(All right, here we go again.  This is a story behind Rinoa Heartilly being known as Rinoa Heartilly, not Rinoa Caraway.  Again, these random snapshots are in no particular order; last chapter happened at age five, this at age sixteen.  So it goes, I suppose.  Bear with me.  Reviews are welcome.)

"_What_ is it that you can't understand about changing my name?"

"_What_ is it that you can't understand about not being of legal age?" countered the clerk irritably.  "I need your guardian's consent if you aren't 18."  He looked past her expectantly.  "Next?"

"The only person behind me," Rinoa said through clenched teeth, "is the old woman who has been asking you for the past hour about the whereabouts of her dog.  Which is _dead_."

The clerk's mouth twitched faintly.  "Look.  I can't help you.  Just go back to your father, all right?"

"I am _not_ going to be called by that man's fucking name!  I am _not_ Rinoa Caraway!"

"Keep your voice down, for Hyne's sake," the clerk hissed.  "How many times have we been through this?  You've been coming in here since you were fourteen… just go back.  What would you do with your mother's maiden name, anyway?"

"I'm leaving Deling," Rinoa said quietly.  

The clerk digested this.  "For where?"

"Timber."

"…_Why_?"

Rinoa bit her lip absently.  "Because I'll die otherwise," she said eventually, her voice thin.  "Because… I need to do something real.  Because I can't stand being near him any more."

The clerk observed her without speaking for some time.  She didn't look at him.  Her face was pale beneath her dark hair, her forehead furrowed and thoughtful.

"He _does_ care about you, you know," he offered after a pause.

"I know," she said tightly.  "But that only makes it worse."

"I'm sorry," the clerk said abruptly.  "But you can't change your name.  Not without his permission."

She raised her head to look at him and her eyes burned darkly into his.  

"Oh?" she said, almost lightly.  "I thought it might come to this."

She began fumbling in her bag, dredging out fistfuls of wadded bank notes – all small bills and loose change – and, as one compartment was emptied, another was half-plundered.

"Here," Rinoa said firmly, pushing the hair from her eyes and gesturing to the untidy pile, "is around 5000 gil.  _My_ money, not my father's."  She raised her chin and glared at the clerk.  "Now give me the damned paperwork."

He stared at her unreadably for a few moments.  "How much money do you have besides that?" he asked finally.

Her lips twitched.  "Enough for the train ticket," she said, and there was now uncertainty in her eyes and the line of her jaw.

The clerk said nothing in reply, just continued observing her with a gaze that somehow managed to include the small sad pile of five years worth of baby-sitting money.

Rinoa's hand stole up to clench the ring around her neck, seeking strength.  There was none.

"Please?" she whispered, her confidence gone.

There was some slight change in his expression – it at once softened and hardened.

"All right," he said in a low voice, and he handed her the damned paperwork.

Fifteen minutes later Rinoa Heartilly exited the city hall, her chin high, and made her way to the train station with new determination.  


End file.
